Navigation based Site Map (2000)

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Just out of curiousity, would anyone be interested in an ASP page that builds a site map for your site, based on Front Page’s navigation tree? I wrote a VB .dll that reads the navigation tree into a collection of nodes (without FP’s help…it does it strictly on it’s own), then I have a little asp ‘sample’ code to display the ‘tree’ out on a web page.

Just want to know if it would be worth while to make it ‘soft coded’ for the 2 or 3 parameters needed to make it work on any site.

Drew

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Drew, are you saying this is a “dynamic” site map page that redraws on the fly on the server, or a dev tool used to create a site map during development? Both would be big timesavers, but for users who don’t host their own server, it might be difficult to get the DLL installed on the host machine…so even though a dynamic one would be exciting, it might be useful to fewer people.

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It is dynamic. It needs to see the _fti_pvt folder, which has the structure.cnf file, which is the file that front page stores the navigation in. A lot of hosting companies that host IIS servers, do let you install ActiveX controls. Either way, the code explains how to read the file, so you could do it straight in ASP if you wanted.

I’ll post it later today.

Drew

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Cool!

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Okay, I am attaching the whole kit and kaboodal. The zip file has the .dll, and it’s source files. It also has sitemap.asp which is an example ASP page that uses the .dll. It’s a direct copy of what I have on my companies site, with the Site path and URL changed.

Let me know if ya’ll have any questions. One item to note, if you have more then one root node, this code won’t work (off the runway). It can be modified to handle that. I figured not many people use multi ‘root’ node navigation.

Also, here is a little code you can use in Front Page itself, to dump the navigation out to an excel file, with a little modification, this can be used to write an HTML based site navigation. (The asp version would be real time, requiring no modification after the initial setup. But not everyone can install an ActiveX .dll on their hosting machine.)

Dim strTemp As String
Dim exl As Excel.Application
Dim exlSheet
Dim intRow As Long
Sub ExportNavigation()
Dim Web As Web
Dim rootNav As NavigationNode
Set exl = New Excel.Application
exl.Visible = True
exl.Workbooks.Add
Set exlSheet = exl.ActiveWorkbook.ActiveSheet
Set Web = Webs(“http://yourwebsite.com”)
Set rootNav = Web.HomeNavigationNode
intRow = 1
LoopChildNodes rootNav, 1
End Sub
Function LoopChildNodes(nav As NavigationNode, intDepth As Long)
Dim nd As NavigationNode
exlSheet.Range(Chr(intDepth + 64) & intRow).Value = nav.Label
intRow = intRow + 1
For Each nd In nav.Children
‘strTemp = strTemp & nd.Label & vbCrLf
LoopChildNodes nd, intDepth + 1
Next
End Function

Drew

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